Coming Test of Defenses in Operation Alert

Readiness of the people of the United States to withstand an enemy nuclear attack is to be tested more extensively than ever before, from July 20 to 26, by Operation Alert 1956—the country's third annual civil defense training exercise. In view of widespread uneasiness over the progress and effectiveness of preparations to hold down deaths and injuries if bombs or missiles start falling, there is keen interest to see what advances have been made in civil defense planning since last year's Operation Alert. That test “clearly exposed the nation's un readiness to cope with a thermonuclear attack.”

President Eisenhower, who took a leading part in the 1955 exercise, is scheduled to be in Panama during the opening days of this year's alert. However, the participants will include—in addition to federal, state, and local civil defense personnel—cabinet officers, numerous other top-level federal officials, thousands of employees from more than 30 agencies of the federal government, and sections of the general public in some communities. In the course of a five-hour mock raid 63 population centers, nine Air Force bases, and four Atomic Energy Commission installations are to be “hit” by 139 plane-dropped and submarine-launched “explosives” ranging in force from 20 kilotons to five megatons. More than one-third of the “bombs” are to be in the megaton range, and about two-thirds of the “detonations” are to be made at ground level in order to test the ability of civil defense workers to deal with problems created by radioactive fallout.

The civil defense program has come in for steady criticism ever since it got under way half a dozen years ago. Its shortcoming's and the problems involved received a new and thorough airing this year at hearings before a House Government Operations subcommittee, headed by Rep. Chet Holifield (D-Cal.), which began in January and continued until the end of June. In the course of the hearings Willard Bascom, civil defense adviser to the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, asserted that the United States had no national civil defense policy. Maj. Gen. Otto L. Nelson, Jr. (ret.), chairman of a committee of experts appointed to review Project East River, declared that the present program was “so ineffective and fragmentary that it is worse than no program at all.”